The SIM cards are getting smaller…and possibly showing what’s in store for the next-generation iPhone.

Per AppleInsider and iFun.de, Germany’s Deutche Telekom has begun distributing nano-SIM cards to its partners ahead of the anticipated launch of Apple’s next-generation iPhone.

A picture of the new nano-SIM card being shipped out in Germany was published on Tuesday by German-language site iFun.de. Letters being sent out with the new nano-SIM cards indicate they are intended for “the latest generation of smartphones,” but do not mention the iPhone specifically.

Apple’s next-generation iPhone is rumored to feature a nano-SIM slot that’s roughly 40 percent smaller than current micro-SIM cards. The new design should allow smartphone makers like Apple greater flexibility when designing handsets.

The nano-SIM was a point of controversy earlier this year, when Nokia objected to Apple’s design. The Finnish company argued that the design violated a “no jamming” rule because its length was too similar to the width of current-generation micro-SIMs.

Apple responded in May by slightly adjusting the dimensions of card by adding a small amount of plastic around the edges of the electrical contacts, making the new nano-SIM just long enough so that it can’t be forced lengthwise into an incompatible socket.

Apple’s nano-SIM design was selected by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute in June as the fourth official form factor for the SIM card standard. In July it was said that European wireless operators were placing orders for nano-SIM cards in anticipation of Apple’s next iPhone, but Tuesday’s leak is the first evidence of an official carrier nano-SIM card in the wild.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available as well as full coverage of the upcoming Apple media event on September 12th.

Late Wednesday, virtualization softare maker VMWare released version 5.0.1 of its Fusion software for the Mac.

Similar to other virtualization software packages, VMWare allows users to run alternate operating systems such as Windows and Linux distributions on Intel-based Macs at native speeds. Other features, such as Unity, allow users to run and minimize Windows applications from the Mac OS X Dock.

The new version, a 215.1 megabyte download, can be found here and offers the following fixes and changes:

Resolved Issues:

Install and Upgrade:
– Previously, you could not include the space character in the security server password or a trailing space at the end of the password. If the security server password contained a space, security server installation failed with the message Unable to pair the Security Server with the specified Connection Server.

View Administrator:
– Previously, on rare occasions, when you used the Add Pool wizard, the following error message appeared: “There was an error while trying to determine domains. [errorcode=3,000].” This message indicated that one of the domain objects in Active Directory was corrupted. This issue has been resolved.

View Client:
– A memory leak issue associated with copying and pasting text was addressed and resolved.
Occasionally, if you used a View desktop on multiple monitors and had some application windows open on each monitor, if the View desktop session got disconnected and then reconnected, some of the application windows would change size, position, monitor, or some combination of these. This issue has been resolved.

– Previously, on rare occasions, View Client could not connect to View Connection Server, and the client logs indicated a failure of the AcquireCredentialsHandle API, with a 0x80090305 error. This situation occurred because the message framework component of View Client failed to load the secur32.dll system DLL dynamically. This issue is now resolved by linking secur32.dll statically in Messageframework.dll. With regards to the virtual printing feature, occasionally, one or more printers available from your client system would not become availab le from within your View desktop. Or you would see printers listed in the View desktop that were not available to your client computer but were available from a client computer that you previously used to connect to your View desktop. This issue has been resolved.

– Previously, on Japanese systems, if you used location-based printing, in the View desktop, if you went to the Printers and Fax dialog box, clicked Preferences, and then went to the “Page Setup” and “Advanced” tabs, you would find that the text at the bottoms of these tabs was truncated. This issue has been resolved.

– Previously, when you first logged in to a checked out local desktop, the desktop would sometimes display the following error: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. This issue was most likely to occur for a Windows Vista or Windows 7 guest operating system on a full virtual machine from a manual or automatic pool.

Miscellaneous:
– Previously, if you opened a command prompt in a View desktop and ran the set command, the list of environment variables displayed would sometimes not include the volatile environment variables for View Client. This issue has been resolved.

– Previously, you could configure dedicated View desktops to be suspended if users had logged out but not if they had disconnected without logging out. This issue has been resolved so that you can now configure dedicated View desktops to be suspended when users disconnect. This functionality helps to conserve resources. To enable “Suspend on disconnect”:
Open ADSI Edit.
In the console tree, click ADSI Edit.
From the Action menu, select “Connect to.”
In the “Select or type a domain or server ” field, specify the server name as localhost:389.
Under “Connection point,” click “Select or type a distinguished name or naming context “, and then specify the distinguished name as DC=vdi,DC=vmware,DC=int and click OK. The ADAM ADSI Edit main window appears.
Expand the ADAM ADSI tree, and expand OU=Properties.
Select OU=Global and select CN=Common in the right pane.
Select Action > Properties, and under the pae-NameValuePair attribute, add new entry suspendOnDisconnect=1.
Restart View Connection Server.

New Features:
– New bundled Mac OS X client – The new PCoIP-enabled View Client for Mac OS X is now bundled with this release. For more information, see the VMware View Client for Mac OS X Release Notes.
Client SSL requirement – View Client for Windows 5.0.1, View Client 1.4 for Mac OS X, and the other View 1.4 clients require SSL for connections to View Connection Server. Therefore, you must enter a fully qualified domain name for View Connection Server, rather than an IP address, in the View Server field of View Client. By default, View Client then checks the server certificate that View Connection Server presents. For more information, see the topics about configuring certificate checking in the VMware View Installation document and in the Using VMware View Client documents for the various platforms of View Client.

Fusion 5.0.1 retails for US$49.99 and requires an Intel-based Mac, 2 GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.6.7 or later (10.7 recommended) and a copy of Windows (if you’ll be installing Windows).

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

You can’t knock improvements to a pretty-much-indispensable shareware application.

Michael Tsai’s must-have shareware program, SpamSieve, has just been updated to version 2.9.4. The new version, a 10 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and improvements:

– Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

– Revised and expanded the Frequently Asked Questions to make it easier for people to find, fix, and report problems.

– Fixed a problem where SpamSieve could crash when processing messages from Apple Mail on OS X 10.8, particularly after the Mac had awakened from sleep.

– Workedaround on an issue on OS X 10.8 that could cause training SpamSieve from Apple Mail to be very slow.

– The Train as Good command in Outlook will now move messages from the trash back to the inbox.

– Made various updates to the manual for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, for example clarifying that SpamSieve works (via Apple Mail) during a Power Nap.

– Worked around a problem where Apple Mail couldn’t communicate with SpamSieve if the /etc/hosts file was damaged.

– Improved the error reporting when SpamSieve detects that one of its files is damaged.

– Added defensive coding to try to track down a notification icon problem when running in French.

– You can now set the MJTSoundLoadFromApps default to false if you want to prevent SpamSieve from looking for notification sounds installed by other applications, e.g. to prevent mounting an encrypted Microsoft User Data folder.

– Fixed a bug handling errors if a software update failed; if it succeeded, the .dmg file is now deleted to reduce clutter.

– After purchasing, SpamSieve used to show your user image to indicate that it had been successfully personalized. It now shows a generic checkmark to avoid prompting you for Contacts access on OS X 10.8.

– Added an icon for the crash reporter, since it’s now displayed under OS X 10.8.